My old job - Network technician at Orange Business Services
Posted: Sat May 22, 2021 5:09 pm
From June 2010 to July 2012 I was employed by the ESR Group as a network technician subcontractor. I was on mission at the Orange Business Services datacenter which is located here in Cesson-Sévigné. I was working on off-hour shifts, so that means evenings , nights, weekends and bank holidays. I'd either start at 5.30pm or 1am, finishing at 1.30am or 9am... or 8.30am to 6pm on weekends. Shift times could change from day to day, so it wasn't always that easy sleep wise... and working off-hours meant that I was usually alone, apart from 2 security guards any maybe one or two other people, all in different buildings. There were 4 seperate sites, all in close proximity.
The main bulk of the work consisted of running new RJ45 and fibre optic cabling between machines and switches, be it in the same rack, between racks in the same room, between different server rooms, or between buildings... sometimes over a hundred ports at a time, as things were ever-changing. Apart from that we could be asked to rack new machines or swap over spare parts (hard drives, SFP modules, etc.), or even whole machines. I would also be the eyes, ears and hands of remote level 3 engineers, helping with server diagnostics and link testing... and I would also escort and help various technicians on-site if needs be if they were called out to change hard drives in the EMC² Symmetrix machines, for example. The mix of equipment was pretty varied, from 1990's stuff all the way up to the very latest generations, Dell to HP, Sun and EMC², Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and many more. Pretty interesting !
I would also do security rounds twice a shift to check that everything was OK in the various servers rooms and buildings, taking the company car between buildings. During the rounds I would also collect and replace mangetic backup tapes from the backup machines, and once every night an external security company would come to exchange them for off-site storage. Sometimes I'd go up to the room where they monitor the network traffic and security, which is interesting to see :
If ever there was a power or cooling issue in a room, there were specific procedures to follow, sometimes you'd only have to disconnect, reconnect and restart the machine... but if ever a whole rack went down or god forbid the whole room, all hell brakes loose. During my time there I saw a couple of major incidents, a few times we had cooling issuse when the outside temperature was above 36°c, one time a whole room lost power, and another time there was a fire alert and the gas fire protection that eats up the rooms oxygen was set off (in which case you have to wait until it disipates until you can enter the room and start turning things back on, with everybody panicing in the meantime). If that happens when you're in the room, you only have 30 seconds to get out... not that easy to realise and react if you're lying down with your head under the raised floor doing cabling, especially if you're wearing ear protection and happen to be just next to one of the cooling units.
I enjoyed my time there, but unfortunately ESR Group lost the national subcontractor contract for Orange Business Services, and so after a little more than 2 years we were all out of jobs (about 300 of us !). Adding insult to injury, for the last two months that we were there we had to train the new people that were replacing us ! But, that's how it goes, and that's also how I ended up finding my current job...
Here are some photos from my time there, to give you and idea of what it was like :
And as an added extra special bonus, there was a photo shoot one day with ballet dancers (odd, I know, lol !) :
So, there you go, that's my little story of working in a datacenter...
The main bulk of the work consisted of running new RJ45 and fibre optic cabling between machines and switches, be it in the same rack, between racks in the same room, between different server rooms, or between buildings... sometimes over a hundred ports at a time, as things were ever-changing. Apart from that we could be asked to rack new machines or swap over spare parts (hard drives, SFP modules, etc.), or even whole machines. I would also be the eyes, ears and hands of remote level 3 engineers, helping with server diagnostics and link testing... and I would also escort and help various technicians on-site if needs be if they were called out to change hard drives in the EMC² Symmetrix machines, for example. The mix of equipment was pretty varied, from 1990's stuff all the way up to the very latest generations, Dell to HP, Sun and EMC², Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and many more. Pretty interesting !
I would also do security rounds twice a shift to check that everything was OK in the various servers rooms and buildings, taking the company car between buildings. During the rounds I would also collect and replace mangetic backup tapes from the backup machines, and once every night an external security company would come to exchange them for off-site storage. Sometimes I'd go up to the room where they monitor the network traffic and security, which is interesting to see :
If ever there was a power or cooling issue in a room, there were specific procedures to follow, sometimes you'd only have to disconnect, reconnect and restart the machine... but if ever a whole rack went down or god forbid the whole room, all hell brakes loose. During my time there I saw a couple of major incidents, a few times we had cooling issuse when the outside temperature was above 36°c, one time a whole room lost power, and another time there was a fire alert and the gas fire protection that eats up the rooms oxygen was set off (in which case you have to wait until it disipates until you can enter the room and start turning things back on, with everybody panicing in the meantime). If that happens when you're in the room, you only have 30 seconds to get out... not that easy to realise and react if you're lying down with your head under the raised floor doing cabling, especially if you're wearing ear protection and happen to be just next to one of the cooling units.
I enjoyed my time there, but unfortunately ESR Group lost the national subcontractor contract for Orange Business Services, and so after a little more than 2 years we were all out of jobs (about 300 of us !). Adding insult to injury, for the last two months that we were there we had to train the new people that were replacing us ! But, that's how it goes, and that's also how I ended up finding my current job...
Here are some photos from my time there, to give you and idea of what it was like :
And as an added extra special bonus, there was a photo shoot one day with ballet dancers (odd, I know, lol !) :
So, there you go, that's my little story of working in a datacenter...